Not Feeling Christmasy? Remember Christmas in 5 Ways

I repost this 2011 post every year early in December because *I* need to read it.

But it seems to resonate with others, too.

God bless you all.  

(This is a repost from Christmas 2011, but I thought it bears repeating). 

A friend of mine posted on Facebook that
 he was not feeling very Christmas-y. 

I replied, 

"Define Christmas-y."

I'm not trying to discount his feelings.  What I mean is,  

"What makes you feel like it's Christmas?"

When we don't feel Christmasy it's because we're comparing our "now" with some memory from the past or some image that's presented in society. And often it doesn't measure up. Sometimes we have real reasons that we're feeling the Christmas blues. Maybe we're lonely or depressed. Maybe we're overwhelmed and harried.

Many years ago, when my son who is autistic was small, I had to adjust my views of Christmas. In my growing up, Christmas was about a big toy opening fest on Christmas Day. I thought I would bring that to my family tradition when I had kids. But my son at the time had no interest in toys. So shopping for Christmas presents highlighted that the path we were traveling was a different one, and I didn't know the way. Sometimes I still feel that twinge when I walk the toy aisles. Going to Christmas events was either impossible or very hard when my son was young. My husband and I spent quite a few family Christmas parties off in another room sitting under a blanket with my son, who was completely overwhelmed. I was sad during this time. And I felt lonely. This wasn't the expected path. I had to come to terms that the Christmas season for us was going to be different from what I had envisioned. It wouldn't be a recreation of my childhood Christmases. (Edit added in December 2021 - my son really enjoys presents and Christmas now! He especially loves family gatherings.)


Here's the manger scene  as set up by our son with autism.... I'm not changing it. 

Yesterday I saw a friend at the grocery store who wasn't going to be able to do all the things that Christmas brings because of a busy work schedule.  My suggestion to her?

Pick 5 Things to Do

Pick 5 things to do that if you don't do them it doesn't feel like Christmas. And forget the rest. That list will be different for everyone.

Here's our list:

1. Get a Christmas tree and decorate it as a family.
2. Listen to and sing Christmas carols.  Pandora.com is great for this.  Type in your favorite Christmas carol, your favorite artist and listen to lots of wonderful Christmas songs.  
3. Hang lights.   This year we hung some colored outdoor lights that remind me of the giant ones that used to hang at Granddad's house when I was very small.
4. Make cookies and/or cinnamon dough ornaments.
5. Read the biblical Christmas story at Bible Gateway.   Matthew 1:18-25; Matthew 2:1-12; Luke 1:26-38; Luke 2:1-20.  

Of course, there's more. I didn't put presents in, and we do that. But you get the idea. Make a list that is YOUR list of what preparing for Christmas means. For some people, it means putting up 12 Christmas trees around their house. For others, it means volunteering.   

Accept Your Un-Christmasy Feelings    

Accept that in this year, you may feel like the tired shepherds away in the fields working the graveyard shift. You may feel like Joseph trying to find a place for his family to sleep in a strange city. Or like Mary, waiting and wondering what is to come. Perhaps you're the harried innkeeper trying to wedge in another paying customer. Or maybe you are like old Simeon and Anna, who had been waiting a long, long time for the birth of the promised Messiah.

Christmas still came for all of those people,
despite how they were feeling. 

Tis the Season for Gingerbread

Tasha Tudor's grandmother's gingerbread recipe is below. I want to compare it to my own great-grandmother's recipe, pictured above. There are some similarities.  I made Great-grandma Minnie Lee's recipe a couple years back, and it tasted good.  It wasn't cake-like but quite dense. I wonder if she used self-rising flour so I will try her recipe sometime to check that out. Her children loved the recipe above. 

Tasha Tudor's Grandmother's Recipe: 

Makes 24 servings

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 farm-fresh egg, beaten
• 1 cup light molasses
• 2 1/2 cups unbleached flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup hot water
• 1 1/2 cups dark raisins

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease two iron cornbread pans (12 pieces each) or, if you do not have cornbread pans, two 9 ¥ 9-inch square cake tins.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and the molasses, then sift in the dry ingredients and mix the batter well. Add the hot water and beat until smooth. Stir in the raisins.

3. Fill the prepared tins or pans half full, place them in the preheated oven, and bake the gingerbread 25 to 30 minutes, or until done.

Making Palm-sized Crayons for Gravestone Rubbing Techniques

A crayon rubbing of a heuchera flower stem.

In the days before cameras, paper copies of gravestones were taken using crayon rubbing techniques. Historians and genealogists used these copies to prove birth and death dates for people. Doing crayon rubbings of old gravestones is discouraged by some now, because some stones have been damaged in the past by multiple rubbings weakening the stones. Some cemeteries do not allow people to take do gravestone rubbings. It's always best to ask and it is always recommended to protect historical markers so it's as if you've never been there. 

I'm working on a project where I will need a lot of palm sized crayons for working with children and other people, and the budget won't allow to buy the professional palm sized crayons. So I decided to try melting down old crayons to make them. 

I used a silicon muffin tin for this project, and an oven. First, I peeled the crayons. This can be therapeutic, or soul-crushing. I took a craft knife and cut through the length of the paper to make it easier to peel the crayons.

Then I broke them into pieces and sorted them into color families in a silicon muuffin pan. 

I covered a baking sheet with tin foil, and put the silicon muffin tin on the covered baking sheet. I preheated the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I "baked" the crayons for around 12-15 minutes, until all the crayons were melted. The cups on the outer part of the muffin tin melted first. It took a while for the middle sections to melt. I could have stirred the wax at this point, to make the color consistent. But I kind of like the striations. 

After they came out of the oven, I let them cool and harden 

for about 30 minutes while I was doing other things. 

Then I popped them out of the muffin pan. 

       That part was fun! 

The above work like crayons do, because they ARE crayons. I tested them out, and they work for my purposes for the group project. Having said that, if I were only going to be doing this for me, I would buy an official one from a place that sells gravestone rubbing supplies.  

    

Documenting What IS

Summer in Maine is a very short season, meant to be celebrated and enjoyed. We've been juggling things, as people do. Art got set aside for a while in the process. 

Summer is over now, so to prime the pump, I pulled out some supplies, and did a quick example of a crayon rubbing for a larger project I'm working on. This is the flower stem from a heuchera plant. It was made using a red Oldestone wax rubbing cupcake onto simple copy paper. I'm reproducing what nature has made, so I can't call it my art - at least not yet, until I use it intentionally in a larger work.  I have some ideas I'm working on.  I love how the bloom stems look like a briar stitch on an old crazy quilt. For now, I am "documenting what IS" in more ways than one.

Growth

Last week I celebrated a birthday. I emailed my friend who lives in Texas progress on goals I've made. It has come through hard work and intention. After a stack-up of losses and grieving those, one goal is to put myself out there both figuratively and literally. I joined a local art society to meet people, and submitted some 2D works for the first time publicly this year. 

I started drawing and painting again in 2021, using my ipad, when visiting my mom, who was ill. The image above is one I drew after that. There are things I would fix in this, but I've learned that fixing means you can lose stuff, so I leave it alone. It's a compilation of myself and people I know who are, or were, doing intensive caregiving. People who were caregivers for parents, who are caregivers for adult children who are disabled, and some who were caring for adult children and aging parents at the same time. We are in that developmental stage. 

An opportunity to see the plaster lathe walls in my granddad's old house led to wanting to do some "textural documentation" using gravestone rubbing techniques. I went up to what was my Granddad's house and took a rubbing of the stump of an old tree there. I want to use these "gathered textures" in printmaking somehow. After I set it up, I noticed that the paper and the bottles I was using to hold down the paper looked like a picnic. 

Traffic was definitely slowing down!  Here's a detail from that rubbing from that stump. I walked beneath that tree so many times as a girl. 

I want to take more textural documentations of places I have been, but also of places that I hope to be favorite places. I'm still figuring that out, and that's part of growing. 

Making An Homage Print as a Family

I was given a larger gel plate for Christmas. The day after Christmas, I persuaded my family to do an homage print using techniques shown by Fulton Sim aka ArtWhisperer88 on YouTube. If you are learning about gel printing, his channel is really worth watching! I highly recommend you subscribe to his videos if you want to learn about making monotypes with a gel plate. 

I cut up a snack box to make shapes for family members to add to an inked plate. The shapes laid on top of an inked plate will block the paint from printing on the paper.

The first print was created with three separate print impressions on the same piece of paper with different colors. The first layer was made using golden ochre rolled onto the plate with a brayer, and then drawing random squiggly lines into the plate using a silicone paint pusher/shaper before printing. For the second layer green and purple acrylic paints were rolled onto the plate using a brayer. Then straight pieces of  cardboard were laid around the plate before printing to mask off certain areas. The final layer was a dark Payne's Gray, I think, using cardboard shapes again laid on the rolled plate to mask off certain areas from printing. In this final layer, the shapes were dropped with the printed side of the box down, so it offset words on the plate. I didn't plan this. We decided to print the off-set words to paper  on their own. The last layer of paint (the dark color) might have benefitted from a little less paint, a little medium and maybe little bit of another color like white so it wouldn't have been so "squishy". I might redo something like this to see. We didn't wait for the layers to dry, and that might affect the result as well. 

The print using the off-set words from the snack box is below. This is the “ghost" of what was left on the plate from the final pull of the first print. It's interesting how the words transferred and were randomly cut off. I'll remember to use that offset technique on purpose sometime.

For both of these prints, I might have done another layer of color, but my family liked them at this point. 

I'm learning about how much paint to put on the plate, and sometimes it depends on the type of paper you are printing on.  

Collaborating with Happenstance

I sent the following email to a friend, and it's a good snapshot of what is going on here lately, although edited slightly: 

It's "blowing a gale" as old-time Mainers say. Trees are swaying, rain is pouring. We may lose power, as the lights are flickering. So it was declared a "storm day" for my son and I. I'm soooooo glad my husband suggested/insisted getting a generator installed years ago. It was ostly for us at the time, and meant we couldn't do other things. But I have for sure blessed him every time we have lost power and the generator kicks in. It has helped make these types of days easier and more predictable for my son who likes to know what to expect. 

I spent hours yesterday making prints using the gel plate. The process is very fast, and oftentimes it is the ghost prints (from the paint left on the plate) that end up being the most interesting. I look at paint that is left on the plate after doing an print and ask myself, what could I add that would augment what I see here? I love that process. The ghost print is a very loose print that I would never have planned. But of course I did make the color choices and decide how to apply the paint on the plate based on what I could see in the moment. So it's me "collaborating with happenstance." ™️  😁

I searched the internet for one of the founders of the art college I attended in the late 1980's. This professor was Oliver Balf. Anyway, in an interview, he talked about loving watercolors because using them had an element of surprise to it. That comment really stuck with me, because the element of surprise is why I like doing these gel prints. 

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Take Away: Art isn't always what we can show others, but what art-making can show us. The motivation can be the surprise in the process.